The pivot that would help Rick Santorum

The above headline and this excerpt is from an interesting article by J.E. Dyer:

Rick Santorum is resonating with voters because he is committed and unabashed on his moral ideas, and because he affirms that moral ideas matter – that they are indispensable to government performing its proper role in society.

Conservative voters who are alarmed about the direction of government recognize that procedural mechanisms and ephemeral election-year sentiment can’t fix it. They perceive that our problems with government can only be addressed with moral decisions: difficult decisions made when much is at stake and there are deeply compelling interests in competition with each other. Moral courage exists for such scary things, and doing the right thing when all of the choices at hand will break someone’s china requires a kind of moral courage that rarely sounds soothing to the ears of a harassed public. It is more likely to resonate as trenchant, annoying, or painfully necessary.

Many of the voters are down for that this year. A growing number of them are less put off by the sting of astringent than they are afraid of what will happen if America tries to avoid it. They aren’t irritated by “moral talk”; they are interested and primed for it.

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“If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” —James Madison (1792)